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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

I saw a demonstration of this technology a few years back, at a European military-industrial contractor for which I worked.

It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.

When I later saw that biometric information was being harvested by the same company at airports around the world, I figured - time to get a different job. So I quit.

And now, the tech of individually-targeted assassinations is coming to market.

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> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.

Wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already happening in the Middle East, the unregulated and far away land we like to test all of the West's/Israel's new toys in.

Check out "The Pentagon's Brain" for a view into the ways they've "played at" war since the 40s.

And there I was keeping quiet about the nasty horrible weapons, just like that, which my brain cooks up at 3 am when I can’t sleep, in the hope that no real company would develop them.

I guess I shouldn't have mentioned my idea of artillery shells carrying pumped x-ray lasers as payload, fired straight up for some nice over-the-horizon frying of enemy materiel...

Non-starter. The whole point of ordinance is its cheap. What's wrong with ye olde ground based x-ray laser and a mirror on a satellite?

> Non-starter. The whole point of ordinance is its cheap. What's wrong with ye olde ground based x-ray laser and a mirror on a satellite?

Mostly the fact that

1. as someone mentioned already, x-ray lasers are not easy to generate, with designs sometimes using nukes to pump them [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur ];

2. while x-rays can be reflected, x-ray mirrors don't behave like optical mirrors because the wavelength of an x-ray is in the same ballpark as the size of atoms (10 nm to 0.1 nm, with atomic radii being in the 0.1-0.01 nm range), and they only reflect 100% of incident radiation when it hits them at very shallow angles ("For gold at 1 keV, the critical reflection angle is 2.4 degrees") [see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/128247/how-would... http://henke.lbl.gov/optical_constants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics ].

When talking about lasers pumping out enough energy to be usable as weapons over distances of hundreds of kilometers - to bounce them off a satellite - you will need a mirror that can reflect that ray almost perfectly, or you'll just blast your own satellite out of the sky. And to do that, that mirror will only be able to reflect your ray at a shallow angle, which pretty much rules out bouncing an X-ray off it (unless your target is in orbit or, I suppose, if you have a fleet of such satellites, and coordinated enough to bounce the ray down 2° at a time).

[Also see http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent... , C-s for "X-ray" and "grazing", but that whole website is a goldmine]

How do you make an x-ray mirror that won't ablate and burn up when trying to reflect that kind of energy?

Also, I said "pumped x-ray laser" for a reason; this type of design usually involves blowing up the energy source and/or the laser medium. Fits the missile or shell use cases.

> The whole point of ordinance is its cheap

Not in the US, with how much missiles cost.

I thought the mean free path of x-rays in air would limit you to, effectively, “radiation mines”? (Or short-range death-rays, robot-mounted because the backscatter would kill a human operative)?

If I'm reading this chart correctly[0], visible light has much worse mean free path than x-rays, so wouldn't x-ray lasers work even better than visible ones?

As for backscatter, that's only an argument for a shell instead of a ground installation - you pulse the laser high up, where the backscatter is of no concern to you.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path#/media/File:Pho...

I saw the same chart, but I thought it’s only showing down to 1 keV photons? Whereas blue light is about 2.6 eV?

My mistake, I confused the scales when reading the chart. Indeed it doesn't extend below 1keV.

> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.

Reminds me of this little presentation [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA

> It was being pitched as the ideal way to assassinate people in a crowd - identify them by heartbeat signature, fly a drone in to drop a small explosive package on their heads.

Hmm, if you're already shining a laser on your target it seems to me there are simpler ways to achieve your goal...

Eventually, you'd mount the laser on the drone, and let it wander around the city doing a search.

The targeting laser tells you, "yes, this is your target," and you just continue painting them with it until they die.

100% success, expected time until death 3-70 years with a 95% confidence interval

High power lasers aren't easy at all to create and point. A bomb or gun is much easier.

I think OP was alluding to a rifle with a laser sight

? OP is saying that the laser will identify the target, the weapon will 'take out' the target.

Even putting aside from the inevitable "misuse", I even wonder about it's intended use. For example:

>Jetson can achieve over 95% accuracy under good conditions

What does this even mean? I can see enormous incentive to avoid false negatives. But I don't see as much incentive to avoid false positives.

For example, the incentives are even less than for drug testing for which there is some semblance of legal proceeding. And yet which are still flawed.

I'm sure it's better than bombing indiscriminately. But it'd be nice to be confident that it isn't going to increase wrongful assassinations due to over confidence.

Did the test you saw attempt to show a low false positive rate too?

From what I’ve heard the confidence rate for targeted strikes is only 70%

>Did the test you saw attempt to show a low false positive rate too?

The words "biometric certainty" were flashed, lets just put it that way.

This reminded me of http://autonomousweapons.org/

Yes, this is all too real to me. What is really scary though, is just how much support the idea of autonomous weapons has in the military-industrial sector - it seems that everyone is working on similar programs.

The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues, and even bringing up a question of ethics around these technologies will get you segregated from the 'cool hunter' classes...

The moral and ethical issues aren't unidirectionally bad - you're building things that keep your side safe/secure and ensure a win. Those are your friends and neighbors on the battlefield - they aren't unthinking stormtroopers, they're the people you went to school with.

Even guided missiles, which seem indiscriminate, are much more precise and limit collateral damage. 50 years ago the alternative was carpet bombing - a guided missile produces much more targeted damage. You can argue that guided missiles save lives - if you want someone dead enough that you're willing to kill everyone around them, having an option to just knock them out seems much more humane (especially to the kids on the nearby playground).

Plus, I'd absolutely hate to be the side that didn't uparmor with autonomous systems - you'd get creamed. Like it or not, it's a part of the battlefield now. I'm not a fan of us bringing back tactical nuclear (low yield) munitions, but that's apparently also happening.

AND the work can be totally badass, the stability/pay is good, and you just get more valuable as you age (unlike being, say, a front end web developer). Plus seeing something you built go out to the range and tear apart a tank/knock down an RPG/launch into space/whatever is really, really dang cool.

"50 years ago the alternative was carpet bombing"

No, it was snipers or specialist teams if it was about taking out one person or a small group with minimal collateral damage. Carpet bombing was for taking out unknown opponents in a specific area with no concern for collateral damage. They could switch off stuff like drones and guided missiles to get more precision using the trained specialists. This is exactly what Richard Marcinko of SEAL 6 wanted after watching SIGINT and technical solutions screw up missions for so long that the human soldiers then had to salvage.

>they aren't unthinking stormtroopers,

They aren't but the bots and drones are.

Those aren't unthinking bots, those are my caretakers in my old age.

Maybe we can set up an automated slaughter factory for immigrants from the global south at the border. It'll be pretty dang cool.

https://www.wired.com/2007/06/for-years-and-y/

If these existed, would people continue attempt to cross illegally? The thought-provoking argument is that these pieces of technology, if foolproof, would go completely unused as people inherently value their lives (but not laws.)

140 documented victims of the clearly demarked killing zones of the Berlin Wall suggests they probably wouldn't go unused. Also can't imagine such technology being successful at actually stopping migrant flows somewhere like the US border unless the government moved to line the coast with them...

Any real technology has dual uses; I cannot say that the things I've worked on are always a positive good for humanity as a whole, they depend on the people wielding them.

I wish I could have lived in a bubble, developing "tech" that didn't matter and was only positive, but even the most disconnected web jockey is paid for by the surveillance-capitalism dollars of the modern internet. That tech might be worse for society overall - it gave us the creeping global eye at a pace faster than legislation could keep up with it, or that society could adapt, and it seemed innocuous at first.

>The most shocking angle of all, is how willing people are to build this technology - like, the cool factor overrides any moral or ethical issues

People tell themselves all sorts of things to justify this kind of cognitive dissonance. The predominant arguments I've seen are:

A) Technology isn't good/bad, it's how you use it. And fortunately for the engineers, the tech will be used far away by people they'll never meet and the details of which will remain classified. Out of sight, out of mind.

B) If we don't build it, someone else will. And we don't want this tech to fall into our enemy's hands first, do we? Best defense is a good offense.

>B) If we don't build it, someone else will. And we don't want this tech to fall into our enemy's hands first, do we? Best defense is a good offense.

I'm not actually clear on what's incorrect about this logic -- unless there's some kind of agreement across all superpowers not to research this subject, or the subject itself is not actually beneficial to research.. why would you assume that none of your potential adversaries are researching it?

And once you recognize that they might research it, and that if they did research it, and you didn't, they might switch from potential adversary to actual adversary (as they now believe themselves to have the upper hand), the only moral and ethical thing to do ... is to research it yourself!

Perhaps the more moral and ethical thing is to give away the technology once you have it, so that you yourself won't have the chance to be aggressor ... but otherwise, I'm not sure how you can justify not researching it (war, and the potential for it, exists regardless of whether you want it to)

The main problem with this logic is it is much easier to steal technology than invent it, so by doing this you are not only assuring your enemies will end up with that scary tech, you are building it for them.

> I'm not actually clear on what's incorrect about this logic

It's this same logic that gave us The Cold War.

yes, and?

Without an absurd premise (eg pretending war isn't an ever-present threat for any nation-state), and without requiring some Oracle or superior governing body to determine behaviors without the fog of war, what superior and general logic should have been applied that would have avoided the cold war?

That this particular bit of logic leads us to the Cold War is well and fine; was the Cold War avoidable with some other reasonable mode of operation?

> what superior and general logic should have been applied that would have avoided the cold war?

The logic that the entire population is stuck on this planet (then and now for the time being), and the resources/ideologies being fought over don't mean a thing if everyone is dead.

I don't see how they're more unethical than any other weapon made to kill.

When you order a soldier to commit a war crime he might refuse. A machine never refuses.

This. Also a machine doesn't come back with PTSD, wounded or in a coffin, so there are no parents, relatives and friends finally realizing the true costs of war.

Of course some crimes are committed by soldiers who are actively disobeying orders. An autonomous weapon is not going to feel any of the emotions that lead soldiers to do terrible things.

He might but humans have this amazing track record of slaughtering each other. Recently (1990s) with machetes in Rwanda. Very low tech.

I don't trust humans to avoid war crimes. Robots could have protections built in in a way that international orgs can verify.

Those international orgs are run by humans.

So what?

Is a gun unethical for having a trigger that never 'refuses' to shoot? And on the other side of that argument, machines lower the risk of atrocities like the rape Nanjing to zero.

The flip side of this argument is that an effective army needs people who to a large degree don't refuse orders.

They aren’t. Conventional weapons manufacturers don’t have a great cool factor. See Masters of War by Bob Dylan for a popular take on this.

I'm down for it. There's no stopping acceleration.

And war, especially modern war, isn't a human task. Humans are bad at it, and it's bad for humans. Cool, precise machines though? No fear, no boredom, no hunger, no sleep. What's not to love?

And it's chic and cyberpunk af. They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.

> And it's chic and cyberpunk af

I actually can't think of something more cyberpunk dystopia we-are-the-bad-guys than mindless killing machines that uphold imperialism.

> They better be smart and unhackable and free of bugs though.

Damn it, this is a joke that I misread, right? Surely you're not serious?

>uphold imperialism

Yeah, this is the rub. Better weapons systems mean easier tyranny.

I couldn't imagine what life is going to be like when there are fleets of these things patrolling cities, but I guess we're going to find out soon enough.

I imagine a scenario akin to Hong Kong - 2 million people, whose leaders are suddenly rendered unconscious mid-march by a fleet of drones.

Imagine if you will, though: getting to the point where these things can be mostly-3D-printed and pumped out in garages.

In est: guerilla drone war.

I assume you are referring to ClearMe? https://www.clearme.com?

But why drop a bomb? Isn't it better to dart with novichok? Or similar nerve agent.

Why didn't you do more to sabotage these efforts?

I wasn't building weapons, but rather rail systems, in the SIL-4 (life-protection) category, but one encounter with the 'cousin' teams with rockets and shiny shoulders was enough for me. I'm okay doing things elsewhere to counter the threat ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason

Explain?

> the tech of individually-targeted assassinations is coming to market.

Aren't all assassinations individually targeted?

Much better: pea-shooter with ricin pellet. So much cleaner, lighter and more targeted.

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